I have an application that needs to apply some transformations to text (including non-affine transformations). Does anyone know of a toolkit (or group of tools) that would let me bring in a True Type or Postscript Font, get the glyphs as outlines, then apply transformations to the outlines and render it as a bitmap or svg file ? Flash won't do non-affine transformations so it is out. Illustrator has a function which converts text to outlines, but Illustrator scripting is very unstable so I can't really use it for this. Thanks for any help.

2 Answers
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For example, this is the output from converting Gentium Basic Regular using the above tool. With the right coordinate system, you can just grab out the path data, transform it however you like, and then draw it with a <path>. Note though that the glyph coordinate system in SVG fonts is actually inverted, with the (0,0) at the bottom left corner of the glyph cell box, compared to the regular SVG canvas which has (0,0) at the top left corner. So don't forget to flip the glyph, e.g. by putting transform="scale(1,-1)" on the <path> you use to render the glyph.

Once you have the SVG document that renders the glyphs as shapes you can convert it to a bitmap using your favourite tool. (Batik can do that too.)

While Batik is a good answer, it will convert only TrueType fonts to SVG Fonts. If you have OpenType fonts, and they more and more dominate now, you can use FontForge to get an SVG Font for these. Another advantage of using OpenType is that the produced SVG uses not only quadratic but also cubic Beziers in the path which is more effective.